5/19/2010 @ 6:40PM1,185 views

China may be one of the world’s most Internet-repressive regimes. But its Great Firewall is a clumsy and ineffective tool compared with the subtle information control techniques developed over the last few years by Russia and many of the former Soviet states.

That’s one of the conclusions of Access Controlled, a new book out from the Open Net Initiative, a consortium of academics focused on free speech and government interactions with the Internet. A sequel to Access Denied, the Open Net Initiative’s 2008 report on the state of global Internet censorship, one of the book’s theses is that government control of the Internet has shifted from directly blocking sites to slicker ways of repressing dissidents online.

Those newer tactics include regulations that subtly induce censorship while seeming to focus on security or crime, timely cyberattacks that mysteriously take down target Web sites at key moments, or drowning dissidents in a sea of online propaganda and astroturf campaigns.

China and Iran still filter the most content online, according to the ONI. In its country-by-country survey of Internet filtering (you can see a map of the results here) it found that China practiced “pervasive” blocking in two categories of the four types of content it checked, and Iran pervasively blocked three. (Only tiny Tunisia filtered as many types of content.)

But while states like Russia and Belarus perform much less of what the ONI calls “first generation” or “Chinese-style” filtering, they’re increasingly adept at “second and third generation” control of the Web.

“Second generation” censorship, as ONI authors Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski define it in an early chapter, includes tricks like requiring Web site owners to register with the government and using the process to weed out dissident sites with red tape, a tactic often used in Kazakhstan and Belarus. In Belarus and Uzbekistan, “veracity” and slander laws are used as a pretense for shutting down dissident sites.

Public safety and security have also been used as excuses to block sites at moments of political importance, such as the censoring of the BBC in Armenia’s 2008 elections, ostensibly aimed at preventing violence in local demonstrations. Or countries will use distributed denial of service attacks to flood sites with data requests and shut them down at key moments, what the ONI coins “just-in-time” censorship.

“Third generation” tactics manipulate the Web in more subtle ways yet. Developed largely in Russia according to the researchers, they often co-opt the Internet as a tool to promote rather than fight government.

In 2008 for instance, Russia tightened the laws requiring ISPs to deploy equipment that tracks users’ online activities, increasing the Russian Web’s power to identify, track and punish dissidents. The ONI says that Russia has also deployed “Internet brigades” of users to post disinformation and propaganda, or to threaten and intimidate opposition groups.

In one case, protestors were warned via cell phone messages that if they participated in a rally they would be assaulted. In another, dissidents were led by online disinformation into an “ambush” by violent pro-government forces.

Compared with China’s hamfisted blockade of dissident sites, slimy tactics like these can’t be as easily detected and opposed, the ONI warns. And while it expects outright blocking to fade over time as countries like China, Burma, and even North Korea become more integrated into the Internet, it expects more countries to evolve these next generation control techniques that use “persistent messaging, disinformation, intimidation, and other tactics designed to divide, confuse, and disable.”

Moves in many countries–including the U.S.–to prepare for cyberwar and militarize the Internet, the book’s authors write, may also be setting the stage for tighter control and less freedom of speech. “The cyberspace enjoyed by the next generation of users may be a very different, more regulated, and less empowering domain than that which was taken for granted in the past,” the authors conclude.

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